Senator FAULKNER (7:30 PM) —Australians want an Australian as their head of the state, and that is, I think, indisputable. It is the clear result of the voting of delegates to the Constitutional Convention, as well as the consistent view expressed in published public opinion polls. As recently as yesterday, the Herald Nielsen poll showed that 54 per cent of Australians agree with the simple proposition that Australia should become a republic. The responsibility of politicians on this issue is to give expression to the will of the Australian people to give them a free and a fair chance to express their views, and that is what the Labor Party has done all along.

We did not support the process that led to last year's Constitutional Convention. We believe that process was flawed. The Prime Minister's control of appointments to the convention and the voluntary voting and postal balloting method for the election of candidates to the convention inevitably undermined and skewed the ballot results. Hence the convention, in the view of the Labor Party, did not adequately represent the views of ordinary Australians about constitutional reform. There is no doubt, in our view, that an indicative plebiscite on whether Australia should become a republic should have been held first and then, and only then, a convention held to determine the most appropriate model. Such a model would have had a great deal more legitimacy, whatever its form, but legitimacy is one thing that the Prime Minister has constantly and consistently sought to deny to the republican cause. The Prime Minister's objective in having the convention first was to ensure that the dead hand of that elitist institution of the monarchy, and those who support it, was able to prevent a true debate on the republic evolving. The tactic was only eventually defeated by the goodwill and the hard work and the compromise of the majority of delegates to the Constitutional Convention. Despite these prime ministerial hurdles, the Labor Party and fellow republicans have pressed on. You might ask why. We hoped, perhaps against hope, that John Howard would honour his word and allow the Australian people to determine a position on this issue without his interference. That has not happened. In the last few days, the Prime Minister has confirmed that he will be an active campaigner against the republic. That is something that he promised the Australian people that he would not do.

I accept that being a monarchist is at the core of John Howard. He is very proud of being a monarchist. It seems to have coloured everything that he has done. It will perhaps colour everything that he does between tonight and the referendum on 6 November. The Prime Minister has for some time been acting as, if you like, a covert saboteur of an Australian republic. But it seems to me that in recent days he has outed himself. He has been starkly revealed now not just as a staunch anti-republican but as a very proactive anti-republican. What is more, he has revealed the depths to which he is prepared to go to defeat the will of the Australian people. We know that the Prime Minister has spent a lot of time with opinion pollsters and spin doctors like his former chief of staff, Mr Graham Morris, and the Liberal Party failure and has-been, Mark Textor, and one thing that these pollsters have taught him is that, in any poll, manipulating the question is the surest way of manipulating the final result. In short, a loaded question gets the desired vote. You have only got to ask Senator Minchin, one of the Prime Minister's strongest monarchists and political supporters. Last year, he said on the Four Corners program:

I've, as you know, been involved in the professional side of the Liberal Party for 14 years. I did a lot of polling myself. I'd have to say I know all the tricks of the trade, and I know you can get any result you like depending on the way you ask the question.

All of Senator Minchin's tricks of the trade are on display here: the manipulation of the question to manipulate the end result.

Maybe the Prime Minister does not want to be seen to be directly opposing the will of the people on this important issue. I think he probably does have some understanding of how out of step he is on this issue with the Australian people. He knows, obviously, that the republican issue is one that has caused deep divisions within his own party, the Liberal Party, and deep divisions within the coalition. It seems to me that that is one of the reasons why, every step of the way, he has sought to complicate and frustrate the path to a republic. It is why he has been actively encouraging many coalition members to advocate differing and contradictory models of the republic or to publicly run the monarchist line.

Those who support the monarchy have joined hand in hand with the Prime Minister to defeat the republic at all costs. But, of course, like him, very few if any of them are prepared to explain why they do not think that an Australian is good enough to be our President, why they do not think an Australian is good enough to be our head of state. There are the McGarvieites—I think Senator Abetz might be one of those—who profess to support having an Australian as a head of state but who want Australia to be ruled by some elitist and ageist council of elders and who would probably be happy if you could give the Queen an Australian passport.

But the most dishonourable of all are people like Mr Peter Reith, the referendum rogues who want to use popular support for direct democracy to deny all Australians an Australian head of state. I was delighted that Mr Reith's fundamental hypocrisy on this issue was really pinned by his Liberal colleague in the House of Representatives Mr Bob Charles, who said:

I talked to him personally last night, I said Reith, I said, I've known you for 13 bloody years . . . and I said, you've had more positions on the republic than the bloody Karma Sutra , mate.

We sometimes disagree with Mr Bob Charles, but Mr Bob Charles got this absolutely right in relation to Peter Reith. Peter Reith will take any position he likes, any position that suits him on the republic at all, as long as it serves Peter Reith's own political ends. What are they? It is not principle; no, Peter Reith is just a plain wrecker.

But the issue that we are debating in this chamber today—the question that will be put to the Australian people in November—is only the latest symptom of Mr Howard's insidious tactics. In the Senate today we can continue to accept and play this game or we can say to Mr Howard, the Australian Prime Minister, `Enough is enough. The Australian people are entitled to an Australian head of state on their terms, on fair terms, following a fair and open debate.' If we give in to the Prime Minister, then he will have won again in what is his basic desire to prop up the extraordinarily elitist institution of the monarchy.

In what I thought was an extraordinary act of bad faith yesterday, Mr Howard sought to torpedo the model to be put to the Australian people by stating that he regarded the process of public consultation for the nomination of an Australian President as a facade—that was his view; it was a facade. Mr Howard knows that that particular aspect of the model was included at the Convention, adopted at the Convention, in a desire to ensure that the Australian people were genuinely involved in the selection process. A number of Constitutional Convention delegates would not have voted for the model if that feature had not been contained within it. It was one of the numerous and important compromises hammered out on the floor of the Constitutional Convention.

But in one of Mr Howard's most cynical moves yet he said that if he is Prime Minister he will either ignore it or manipulate the process to ensure that his nominee succeeds. You have to ask the Prime Minister of Australia a direct question: why isn't an Australian good enough to be our head of state? Why isn't an Australian good enough to be our President? Why doesn't the Prime Minister want to mention in the question that for the first time we will have a constitutional guarantee that our head of state will be an Australian citizen? Why is he happy to mention the involvement of politicians in the selection process but not the role of the people?

I suppose the answer to that is that the Prime Minister is an unquestioning royalist, through and through. He stands for an elitist, sexist, sectarian and fundamentally undemocratic institution—that is, the monarchy—which shares no values at all, has no values at all, in common with ordinary Australians. Hereditary succession is an anachronism. Preference for male heirs is absolutely absurd and ridiculous. Intolerance of a divorced monarch is an absolute farce, and insistence on the monarch—therefore, the Australian head of state—also being titular head of a particular religion and church is totally anathema to modern-day Australia.

The most curious point is why John Howard or any other monarchist is prepared to defend these anachronistic features of the English monarchy. We constantly hear the assertion, or the question, `Why change something if it isn't broken?' Yet when we raise these characteristics so anathematic to modern and democratic Australia, there is no answer from the monarchists. Does John Howard have an answer to these questions? Why should we in today's Australia, one of the most tolerant nations on earth, continue into the next century with these elitist, sexist, sectarian, fundamentally antidemocratic relics of the distant past? Stony silence from Mr Howard and his cohorts.

Mr Howard also questions whether this issue is really important to the majority of Australians. We say it is, that it is fundamental to our view of ourselves, fundamental to our national identity. Why shouldn't our head of state, our first citizen, be one of us? Why shouldn't an Australian be able to aspire to be Australia's head of state—not a representative, but the real one. The Labor Party thinks Australians are good enough to aspire to this and, unlike most of those in the coalition, we will campaign for a reasonable republican model that allows us to express that point of view.

In fairness to the coalition, some on that side of the chamber share our support for a republic. There will be some in the coalition who will join us on the hustings. However, the reality is Australians are ready to face the 21st century with an Australian head of state but the coalition and the Prime Minister are not. It is the coalition that, in trying to paper over the cracks within its ranks, will try to delay the republic, perhaps forever.

The government's compromise on the long title is not acceptable. It is a self-confessed attempt to prevent the divisions within the coalition on the republic from bubbling to the surface. It has nothing to do with putting a fair question to the Australian people. The bipartisan joint select committee made a clear compromise recommendation on the long title that is fair to all. In my view, to compromise further is to give ground to the monarchists, to allow the Prime Minister to jump from one foxhole of deceit to another.

It is important to describe in the question the President as an Australian President. The Queen is not an Australian citizen and the Governor-General need not be one. A fundamental feature of this model is it ensures for the first time that by force of our own Constitution, our most basic law, our head of state has to be one of us. The mention of the appointment process is also misleading. The bipartisan joint select committee said:

The Committee considers that the reference in the draft long title to the two-thirds majority of the Members of Parliament gives an incomplete picture of the essential feature of the nomination process which involves public consultation and a process for bipartisan nomination by both the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition.

The Labor Party remains firmly of the view that the bipartisan and bicameral parliamentary committee did come up with the right compromise.

While there will obviously always be some who feel a different nuance may be better on such a fundamentally important issue, the committee's recommendation for the long title is the desirable outcome. We believe that these words accurately and comprehensively describe the intent of the referendum, and we will be supporting the recommendation in this place and in the broader Australian community. Kim Beazley said earlier today:

I am resigned, cheerfully, to fighting for an Australian Republic and modernising our Constitution. At the end of the day, the question will be important, but the critical thing is going to be to win the Australian's hearts and minds behind this very necessary change at the end of the century. And, frankly, this is all going to be out of the way in the course of the next couple of weeks, and then I'm going to be stuck right into the campaign.

We have noted that the Democrats' alternative proposal has been released late this afternoon by Senator Stott Despoja. I am pleased to see you are out of exile, Senator. That is good. Of course that is the proposal for a bald statement referring to a republic. That is also, I think, a product of the parliamentary committee. Our initial view is that that is positive and we are prepared to look at the merits of that alternative. But we remain fully in support of the committee's recommendation as the best means of achieving a positive vote in the November referendum.

If we drop the ball on this issue, we will have really let ourselves down. We will have let the Australian people down by not giving them a fair vote on this referendum, which marks our entry into the 21st century as a truly independent and self-governing nation. Let's have an Australian Republic. What a great way it will be to finally symbolise this nation's coming of age. Why would anyone want to prevent this from happening?

Debate (on motion by Senator Ellison) adjourned.